Bruce Byfield's blog

My strengths and weaknesses as a writer

Having had over 900 professional sales in the last seven or eight years, I am starting to call myself a writer without feeling like a fraud.

To help me make decisions about what other kinds of writing I want to try, I have drawn up a list of my strengths and weaknesses as a writer as honestly as I can. Here they are, in no particular order:

Strengths

An omnivorous reading habit: I’ll read anything, and I read constantly. So far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t write if I hadn’t been in love with reading since I was four years old. I would also know much less about the possible choices when I write.

A reliance on a spoken vocabulary: I believe that the standard for any language is how it is spoken, so I rarely use words in my writing that I wouldn’t say aloud. I believe this gives a directness to my writing that it wouldn’t otherwise have. I can define far more words than I use in anything except academic writing.

An inner ear: I hear what I write or read in my head as though it were spoken out loud. Consequently, my writing has a rhythm to it that helps draw attention to it.

A belief in the importance of truth: I don’t believe in objectivity or absolute truth. But I do believe that truth exists externally, and that some viewpoints are more valid than others, and worth expressing as accurately as possible.

A difficulty in lying: Thanks to repeated exposure to George Orwell, I am convinced that a writer’s duty is state the truth, even when doing so means facing up to unpleasant facts about themselves or others.

An awareness of structure: While I am proud of my ability to reel off memorable phrases, I am prouder of my ability to see the structure in a piece of writing, and to give a suitable shape to my own work. This ability is rarer than the ability to produce striking phrases, and more important to successful writing.

An ability to draw analogies: In my experience, most people see differences around them. I see similarities, which means that I can often suggest something new to them.

A belief in the need for fairness, and for acknowledging other viewpoints: This belief has nothing to do with being friendly and everything to do with improving the development of my thoughts. I deepen the development of thoughts when I consider alternative explanations. I also give myself more to write about as I explain why my chosen explanation works and what is wrong with other ones.

A perception of multiple-causes: I do terribly on multiple-choice questions unless “All of the above” is frequently included. To pretend that one or two reasons are enough to explain most things – especially people’s motivations – is to introduce inaccuracies and falseness into your work. And, by acknowledging multiple-causation, I find still more to write about.

A memory strong on recognition, but not outstanding on recall: Often, I cannot dredge up a memory myself. But if someone or something triggers a memory, my mind is better than almost everybody’s. I suspect that recognition is more important than recall for a writer, because, when a memory is buried, all sorts of interesting connections are made to it in your mind. By contrast, I suspect that a photographic memory impedes this imaginative process, which is why I’m glad that I don’t have one.

Weaknesses

A reluctance to edit: By the time I finish writing, my mind is already moving on to something else. I can only edit myself by an act of will, and I’m still not very good at it.

An over-use of transitions: I’m so obsessed with structure that I would start every sentence with one if I let myself. As things are, one of my routine editing tasks is to delete most of the “first of all”, “on the other hand”s and other transitions.

A phobia about fiction: Above all else, I want to be a fiction writer. It means so much to me that it’s taken me years to actually be able to write it. Poetry? Essays? Articles? No problem. But, when I try to write fiction, I freeze up.

A straining after effect: I am far too fond of the original or striking phrase, perhaps because my first professional publications were poetry. I’ve taken years to learn that a really pithy expression might not be good for the work as a whole.

A handwriting that is indecipherable: In elementary school, I won prizes for neat handwriting. Then I became a university instructor, and wrote so many comments on student essays that my cursive writing became illegible. I switched to printing, and it also became illegible – even to me. I’ll write things down in the middle of the night so I remember them, only to have no idea come morning what I scrawled.

An over punctiliousness about references: Not only do I rarely leave “this” unqualified by a following pronoun, but I make a point of using names rather than pronouns. While these habits make for absolute clarity, they often sound awkward, especially when I use a name too many times in the same sentence or paragraph.

A love of weasel words: “Appear,” “seems.” and other qualifiers appear far too often in my work. I’m not sure whether they are a remnant of too many academic papers, or reflect a world view in which very little is absolutely certain..

An over-emphaticness: In compensating for the qualifiers I use naturally, I often go too far and sound too blunt, or even rude.

A tendency to write lists: (Enough said)

A few of these points are probably universal – for example, I don’t think I’ve met a professional writer who didn’t read everything they could get their hands on. However, others probably reflect that I mainly write non-fiction, and still others are undoubtedly idiosyncratic.

Still, I offer them for whatever they might be worth. They are not the formula for success (of a kind), but I hope they might be interesting as one formula for success. I only wonder what I’ve left out because I can’t perceive it.

Found my way back here again. 😛 Perhaps it’s time to evaluate your self again OP and see if you’ve changed? That would interesting. I’m better at crammer now. (lol usually, so many epic fails in comments it’s embarrassing. Slow down self!)

One of your strengths conflicts with what you listed one of your weaknesses. If you’re interested in presenting yourself truthfully, then the “weasel words” you mention are hard to avoid.

For example – “He appears to dislike chocolate” is a truthful statement of your impressions about somebody. “He doesn’t like chocolate” is either an opinion or a retelling, but in either case it’s presented as a fact when it’s not.

I believe Orwell himself commented on this mode of speaking, probably in “Politics and the English Language.” I’ll have to go reread that to make sure, though; it’s been sitting on my shelf since I first read it more than 20 years ago.

Avoiding weasel words might nonetheless be a good idea as a purely mechanical thing, but I say not at the cost of speaking dishonestly.

I know this is an older post, but if this comment makes it to the writer of this post, I just wanted to let you know that i found your information really helpful. I just started going to college after many years out of school. My first assignment in Eng 110 is to write a journal entry about what I think my strengths and weaknesses are as a writer. Naturally I decided to google strengths and weaknesses of writers and your post was first to pop up! No worries I did not plagiarize your ideas but they definitely gave me tons of stuff to think about and got my thoughts rolling which I needed badly because I was really stuck. Actually my list is in some ways opposite from yours but the part about being a lover of reading was definitely the same. I just wanted to let you know, even though you wrote this a long time ago, its really good information. Before I read your thoughts, the things I had written down were like stock answers without detail. You also helped me think outside the box about what the strengths of a writer can be. Thank you so much Bruce!